


Under the Yoke

by ecrivant



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Depression, F/M, Guilt, Intimacy, M/M, Marley (Shingeki no Kyojin), Marley Arc (Shingeki no Kyojin), Other, Reader-Insert, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Hatred, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:41:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28310319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecrivant/pseuds/ecrivant
Summary: An exploration of Porco’s life after the Warriors leave for Paradis, told through a collection of vignettes.
Relationships: Porco Galliard/Reader
Comments: 15
Kudos: 57





	Under the Yoke

He sat, crumpled, clutching a hand which bore bloodied and broken knuckles, unfeeling. His white clothes, once pristine and perpetually ironed and representative of honor and heroism and potential, were now marred by redness. Covered in the eviscerated gore and dermis which, from his forelimb, surged. The hole in his bedroom door, framed by splintered wood and dressed with remnants of that same sanguinary amalgam. The air, once tenanted by irate bellows and gesticulation, stood oppressively still. Occupied, now, only by his swallowed sobs. From the window: the muffled, revelatory sounds of the Warrior commemoration ceremony one street over; and he, in his room, washed in the quiet, aching aftermath of ebullition. Another roar, hoarse, abraded, a guttural eruption. He launched forward in an attempt to lash out, again—at the door, the wall, himself—but his legs buckled beneath him and his palms, outstretched by instinct to catch his exhausted form, scraped against the floor, leaving bloody trails in their wake. His corporeal pain, once numbed by rage, now crept along skin and burrowed into bone, and he cradled his own form, laid fetal, and wailed. A prolonged, cathartic cry which propagated another, and another, until his lungs burned, raw and void of breath, and head thrummed, and soreness and anguish within him suffused. From outside the window, a cheer; within, cries, spates of ‘why’s,’ directed at no one. The Armored Titan, squandered—his own failure from which he already imbibed such abject and indefinite nemesism. His mouth tore open in a disfigured cry; no sound emitted. A breathless, silent whine; vision blurred by tears. 

Sight and sound dissolved as blood poured from his wounds, relentless. Numbness returned—he remarked from afar the peaceful exit from his own body. He was vaguely aware of his door slamming against the wall as it opened. His name, a hazy and distant vocalization, repeated, urgent. A violent shaking of his body. On his cheek, a soft touch. He maybe saw your face. Concerned, no, fearful eyes. His own voice, thick in his throat, pathetic and begging and desperate:

“Please just let me die.”

The tremors of footsteps on wood, of weak limbs. Then his brother, his mother. You. The vague feeling of being lifted to his feet, of being stripped of his clothes, of being laid on the bed. A cloth, cold on tender skin.

Marcel’s embrace.

Sleep so abnormally dreamless and pitch that he was sure he had died, pervaded by a feeling of absence.

He awoke in the darkness of night and felt he was not alone. Eyes adjusting, he saw one body in a chair next to him, another in his brother’s bed. His entirety complained, aching. A low groan escaped him. The one in the chair stirred at the sound and eyed him in the dark. He could all but see the scrutinizing gaze. A grip on his uninjured hand, squeezing. His brother’s whispered apology. 

Marcel rose from his seat and roused the other, who groggily sat up and listened for a moment before rushing over to the bed. Another hand in his, this time soft and un-calloused, and timid. He, now acclimated to the dark of the room, saw your scrunched face and teary eyes and quivering lip. You bowed your head to hide them, instead bringing his hand to your forehead, still trembling. As if in mourning.

“Let him sleep.”

A gentle command, for your sake and not his. He wished for you to embrace him but could not bring himself to say it. 

—

He woke to his mother’s insistence that they see Marcel off. He first thought of you. 

“Mom, don’t make him go.”

He felt his brother approach his bed, slow, timid. A kiss on his temple. A whispered promise:

“I’ll be home soon.”

—

He staggered as he climbed out of bed. The bandages on his hand and forearm, the hole in the door—ugly reminders of his abortion. Weak fingers fumbled with the buttons of his shirt. Fresh blood seeped through the gauze around his knuckles, spreading over the fibrous surface like a creeping, infective redness. 

He made it to the port just as the boat undocked and withdrew from the shore. He saw you in the crowd, hand excitedly waving in the air as if a flag enlivened by breeze. 

He returned home and undressed himself and laid back in bed and closed his eyes just as his mother reentered the house and forthwith tended to her sleeping child’s wounds. 

—

A knock at his door.

“Porco? It’s Pieck and Zeke.”

“Tell them I’m alright.”

His mother bit her lip before shutting his door again.

He did not wish to see them, though he thought of them each day. Becoming less like people and more like deformed effigies begotten from his own envious thoughts. Though a given, since the beginning, that Zeke would claim the Beast Titan, he considered that he could have inherited Cartman. A moment of clarity told him Pieck was more than deserving of her inheritance, and he flushed with guilt. The candidacy, Reiner, they had made him so spiteful.

Still, he did not wish to see them. 

Another knock at the door. He repressed the annoyance that flared in his chest.

“Yes?” 

He could not help the edge that slipped through. 

His eyes widened when you stuck your head around the door. Eyes asking for permission to enter. He moved to make room for you on his bed, granting it. Mattress dipping as you sat. Your hands gently turned his injured arm in inspection—its gauzy covering now gone and replaced by a dusting of red-rimmed scabs and pale, white scars. The haphazard gash in his wrist nearly but a memory. The touch, gentle, nearly imperceptible. Again feeling guilty, as he had not thought of you in weeks, though you should have been the first to which he turned. Your non-affiliation with the Warriors was something he unknowingly craved. Soft fingers grazed his arm and the sillage of your scent hung in the air, calming him. He needed your touch, a same and even greater need than that night before the Warriors’ departure. 

You did not speak and instead wrapped your hands around his. Heedful of his injuries. Even in the dim candlelight of the room, a ray of moonlight flooded through the window and struck his floor—an expansive stain of red, impossible to fully remove, illuminated. You gazed at him, sad, as if you pitied him. He wished he had not seen it, perhaps he was not meant to, and he asked you to leave before he could suppress his anger. He spurned your pity. 

You were surprised but not hurt: instead, he was met with a melancholic look, one of understanding. As you walked out, shutting the door behind you, he wished you had been hurt—he envied your emotional control, your empathy. Hot tears spilled from his eyes, and they blurred his view of you leaving the front stoop and walking down the street, swallowed by the night.

He grabbed his pillow and hurled it at the wall. It landed with a dull thump. If he was anything like you, he could have controlled his anger and kept you with him. Spent the night in your presence. He gritted his teeth and slammed back onto the mattress, taking notice of the missing cushion. He rolled to the side and slept without it.

—

He could not say when he finally rescinded the grudge he held against Pieck and Zeke. He began talking to them again, finally caving on his self-imposed strike after realizing he was lonely, but it felt more like a return out of necessity. He was not sure he truly missed their companionship; though dulled, the spite and anger and jealousy were all still present. 

At the same time, he immersed himself further into Marley’s all-encompassing military-industrial complex. Endearing himself to Magrath. Continuing his training. Helping where he could. As if to fulfill some sick, vicarious fantasy where he was a Warrior, as well, only left behind with Pieck and Zeke. The schmoozing felt insincere, dirty, yet he continued, to what end? He was worse than Reiner—a fucking ass-kisser with no goal in sight. Subconsciously aware his constant exposure to Marleyan army affairs only exacerbated and prolonged the pain of his failure. 

“Why still be involved?”

He frowned at your question—a large part of him assumed you would support him, regardless. At least support him based on the fact it was somehow comforting for him, a twisted form of self-actualization. He narrowed his eyes as you continued.

“Maybe it’s better this way. You—”

You cut yourself off, hesitant. He urged you to say your piece, an edge in his voice.

“If you’re not a Warrior, you can live a long life.” _With me,_ the implicit addendum. He ignored it, quiet long enough that you felt emboldened to continue. 

“Sometimes this war, it feels so pointless.”

Faced with futility. Your extrapolated silver lining. Something repressed urged him to give in, to agree. Whether flaccid will or a desire to live with you, he could not be sure. You had always felt so nice.

Though he could not, could never, bring himself to despise you, he convinced himself to despise the words you spoke. 

“What are you, a fucking pacifist now?”

You shrunk away, the vitriol in his voice, a disarming blow. To serve Eldians was his life’s purpose, and you were meant to support him indefinitely, it being in your nature. You began to speak, but he ignored it. Anger flaring. The more he thought on it, the easier you became to hate. All the years he had known you, you were nothing but a backgrounded entity. His very antithesis. Your affinity for pacifism was no surprise to him—it was very much like you to sit to the side and wish for things to happen instead of taking it upon yourself to actualize them. You moved through life without purpose, a passive body with no real substance. It was a wonder he had ever liked you at all. 

“You know it should have been me. I should have been the one to go to Paradis, not Reiner.”

The hurt in your eyes urged him forward, though, in hindsight, he wondered if it was your own hurt, or hurt for him, which shone in your gaze. A sadness, pity, that he could not let go of his apparent past transgression, could not overcome his own self-hatred. Were there truly many differences between you?

He lashed out once more, another jab. A sadistic self-projection. 

“How can you live a life so devoid of purpose and meaning? Don’t tell me what I should and shouldn’t do. I was meant to be a Warrior for humanity, so that’s what I’ll do. And I don’t care how I get there.”

He flinched, less at the words and more at the way some form of the truth so willingly poured from his mouth. Quiet, eerily pervasive. A surge of guilt in the pit of his stomach. Like bile. Your tears stung his throat. 

“Never would humanity’s true savior be so selfish.”

You stood and turned at the heel and strode off, quickly wiping at your eyes. It was his turn to be winded by your words. 

—

He slammed his fist against your front door, rapid and repeated like a heartrate. Your father answered and saw the raw desperation in his eyes and led him to your room. He opened the door and collapsed before he reached you. Spoken through choked sobs—the pain, cotton forced down his throat:

“Marcel is dead.”

Your arms were around him as if your last shared moment, at this point years ago, was not one of bitter vitriol. He, eviscerated by guilt and all but gutted on the floor before you. Your unrelenting sympathy, so willing to forgive his malignity—to think you had nothing but love to give in return for his spite. You held him unflinchingly as he disintegrated in your arms. Unafraid to shoulder the weight of his tangible unraveling. He thought of that moment years ago, alone in his room, bleeding out, a result of his own rage, and realized true pain was nothing like it. To be so utterly excavated by grief and pain that your own form has no choice but to erode into itself. His screams caught in your shirt. He bit down on the fabric, tasting blood.

He lied in your bed that night and felt nothing. Your touch, once so verily craved, was unaffecting. Still, you ran your hands along his sides and caressed the shapely variations of his form, and you pressed your lips to his neck and back, and he allowed you to straddle him and kiss his face and chest and arms and endeavor to extract his pain through your ghostly contact. He knew you felt nice, even if he himself could not tell. Your comfort reached him and dissolved on contact, yet he still indulged and met your touch with his own. Nevertheless unfeeling. 

—

From you, he had never seen true anger. Though, when he told you he was to support Pieck in Paradis, he saw it—it was quiet, nothing like his violent, external fulminations. Instead, your stare held unprecedented intensity, some amalgam of rage and fear that made him instinctively flinch; and, for once, it did not seem like selfless emotion. He sadistically reveled in the way you finally felt fear for someone other than him. 

He was leaving Marley with some naïve intention of returning, to be with you upon doing so. Yet, you both knew your shared life was a moot point after his inheritance of the Jaw Titan­—he had betrayed you, and in some way, his own selfish wishes. He had not matured at all, forever and always a slave to his desires. _To die for Marley_ , you informed him, and no matter how many times he countered with his ambition to save the Eldians and salvage the remnants of his past failures, he invariably, though subconsciously, acquiesced to your position. His ultimate objective: to die for a cause. 

Your anger, short-lived, ephemeral, even. It gave way to such harrowing sorrow. He wondered, as he held you, if you finally allowed yourself to cry selfishly, to cry for the death of your own desires. 

You kissed him, desperately. Long and sweetly brackish from tears. He laid you down his bed, the one in which years ago he lied as well, craving your embrace in the darkness, and touched fingertips to bare skin. His despairing memorization of your body. Your breathy murmurs, tearful; yourself, a numinous beauty he sought to worship. He could not elude his adoration for you, and as you made love that night, a shared intimacy so imbued with and pervaded by heartache, he knew he would die regretful. His pain and yours, fatefully pre-written. He had always been destined for stagnation, abjection, sorrow, loss—driven by some cruel divinity and jejune, self-sacrificial desire to fulfill his own doomed fate. The cruelty of fatalism. 

“Come back to me,” you had whispered. 

—

In his last moments, he thought of that night. He did not deserve a final thought so pleasant. He instead thought of you presently, home in Liberio, waiting for his promised return. Is this how Marcel felt, as he breathed his last breath? Did he think of his little brother to which he promised return? He all but laughed at the ironic cyclicality of life. Falco would inherit his thoughts, and his brother’s thoughts, and one day see the reality of anguish and broken promises and futile desire, perhaps on the evening of his own violent death.

—

Through his love, he also immortalized you—forcing you to live on as some perpetually degraded image and, eventually, simply an ephemeral feeling of comfort in those who would inherit his memories. He figured you would hate the thought. Part of him wished he could loose you from this eternal cycle, freeing you from his memory and thus the endless lineage of memory you would come to inhabit. Or maybe he wished for this selfishly, wanting you to be experienced by no other. 

—

You would hate his last words, spoken at Reiner out of abject spite, selfish, though they were more of an assurance than anything. A closure for his younger self, whose apparent failures haunted him until this moment. 

—

He wished you had not asked him to return; he wished he had not believed he would. 

—

He was surprised by his own fear. As he allowed himself to be eaten, he only thought of dying. It would be too painful to think of anything else. Yet, you somehow slipped through, one final time.

**Author's Note:**

> this was based on a request i got on my tumblr (@ecrivant ;) if you want to check it out)! fleshing out porco's history was honestly so much fun; exploring side characters’ arcs may be my new favorite thing. also, i feel kinda bad because the person who requested asked for fluff but i can’t seem to write anything that isn’t tinged with some kind of melancholia. 
> 
> anyway, thank you all so much for reading! i hope you enjoyed the piece! i kind of fell in love with porco while i wrote this, so expect some more writing for him lol. feedback and constructive criticism are always appreciated!
> 
> also also, merry christmas to those who celebrate it! and regardless, i hope everyone has a great holiday weekend! xoxo <3


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